The glad tidings we refuse to believe
Photo: Mario Tama / Getty Images
On New Year’s Day, I wrote a piece for CapX entitled “Sixteen Reasons to be cheerful about 2016”.
Some of those reasons were general
(poverty would fall, average IQ would rise) and some were tied to
specific forecasts (driverless cars would move from the labs to the
roads, Britain would vote to leave the EU).
Depending on precisely how you define
them, I reckon I got between 12 and 14 of my prophecies right. Daesh has
not been defeated, though my prediction that Mosul would fall to the
Iraqi Army this year looks as though it may be out by only a few weeks.
Nor has India quite made the breakthrough to the first rank of world
powers – though, again, that is surely a matter of time.
But driverless cars are indeed on the
roads in California and Texas, with Australia set to follow. The world
economy grew – albeit by slightly less than was predicted last year.
Extreme poverty continued to fall.
Our screens are filled with the horrors of
Iraq and Yemen; but we forget about the conflicts where violence is
tapering away: the Mexican drug wars, the Colombian civil war, the
insurgencies in Burma, Xinjiang, North-West Pakistan and Burundi, the
Eritrea-Ethiopia border war which claimed more than 70,000 lives. Even
in Syria, the overall death toll continues to drop from its 2014 peak.
Meanwhile, the world continues to get cleaner, greener, healthier and wealthier.
So will we extrapolate from the uplifting
news? Nope. We will continue to believe, like every generation that has
gone before, that ours is a uniquely troubled, violent, corrupt and
soulless age.
Books predicting disasters – planetary
overheating, asteroid strikes, drugs-resistant superbugs, a collapse of
the monetary system, the imposition of sharia law on Europe – will
continue to sell. Few publishers will give time to authors who argue
that, in general, things will get better – patchily and erratically,
perhaps, but better none the less.
If you go to church over Christmas, you
will be enjoined from the pulpit to think of the homeless and the
hungry, and quite right, too. But you almost certainly won’t hear a
clergyman admit that the homeless and the hungry are proportionately
fewer than at any moment in history. This is the season when Christian
ministers are meant to preach the Good News; yet they struggle, like the
rest of us, to admit that it can have an earthly as well as a celestial
manifestation.
Why are we all such moaners? Because we
still have the instincts of hunter-gatherers. On the savannahs of
Pleistocene Africa, pessimism was a survival mechanism. Our ancestors
lived in a world of constant danger and violence: strangers were more
likely to be a threat than an opportunity. Hopeful and trusting souls
were less likely to survive.
Optimism, in the present age, represents a
victory of intellect over intuition. It reflects the rich, secure,
interconnected world of voluntary exchange and private property, not the
Hobbesian terror of the tribe.
And here’s the really good news. Once you
accept, intellectually, what is happening to the world, you start to
realise how extraordinarily lucky you are. When that happens, your
emotions catch up, and you truly become more cheerful. Seriously – try
it.
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